Editor’s note: Tyisha Miller was a 19-year-old African-American woman shot dead by Riverside, California police in 1998. Miller had been passed out in her car, resulting from a seizure, when police claimed that she suddenly awoke and had a gun; they fired 23 times at her, hitting her at least 12 times, and murdering her. Bob Avakian addressed this.

If you can’t handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this “serve and protect” bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene. They could have and would have found a solution that was much better than this. This is the way the proletariat, when it’s been in power has handled—and would again handle—this kind of thing, valuing the lives of the masses of people. As opposed to the bourgeoisie in power, where the role of their police is to terrorize the masses, including wantonly murdering them, murdering them without provocation, without necessity, because exactly the more arbitrary the terror is, the more broadly it affects the masses. And that’s one of the reasons why they like to engage in, and have as one of their main functions to engage in, wanton and arbitrary terror against the masses of people.

Bob Avakian, BAsics 2:16

September 19—An Oklahoma City pig claiming he was investigating a hit-and-run accident pulled his Taser when 35-year-old Magdiel Sanchez, sitting on his own porch, stood and slowly walked off it. Sanchez, who was deaf and unable to speak, could not understand the pig’s commands, so he was trying to communicate by making hand gestures. Sanchez was holding a stick or pipe, which he always carried to chase away stray dogs and to communicate with people when he walked around the neighborhood.

Six neighbors ran toward the cop, desperately yelling that Sanchez couldn’t hear. Among them was the 12-year-old daughter of a family that lives a few houses away, who shouted at the pigs, “Don’t kill him, he’s deaf. Don’t shoot!” While they were still screaming, another pig arrived, pulled his pistol, and both cops opened fire, murdering Magdiel Sanchez.

The father of the 12-year-old told KOCO 5 News: “They killed an innocent man. He was never aggressive to nobody. He was a real nice guy. I don’t think he deserved to die like that.”

Learning of the killing, another hearing-impaired man told his own story on social media about nearly being killed by a cop in Las Vegas for using his cell phone while walking on the street: “…it’s terrifying to imagine that he could’ve shot me because I did my usual ‘step forward to hear better’ move…. I’m lucky he didn’t freak out and shoot me…. I’ve been screamed at by idiot cops on several occasions for dumb reasons…. I’m lucky that I’m a white dude.”

For the pigs, the cold-blooded killing of Magdiel Sanchez was a “freebee”—another chance to violently take away the life a human being for nothing, right out in the open. This is not about the police needing “better training,” body cameras, more “supervision,” or whatever. Under this system of exploitation and oppression, the role of the police—what they are supposed to do on behalf of those who rule over us—is to brutalize, terrorize and, yes, murder people, with Black, Latino, and Native American people disproportionately targeted. That’s why the outrageous police shooting and murders just keep coming and coming—and why, in case after case, the murdering pigs walk free, like the cop in St. Louis who was declared “not guilty” by a judge for the killing of unarmed Anthony Lamar Smith.

Bob Avakian, architect of the new communism and Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, referring to another wanton killing by police, said in BAsics 2:16:

If you can’t handle this situation differently than this, then get the fuck out of the way. Not only out of the way of this situation, but get off the earth. Get out of the way of the masses of people. Because, you know, we could have handled this situation any number of ways that would have resulted in a much better outcome. And frankly, if we had state power and we were faced with a similar situation, we would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and you put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people. Fuck all this “serve and protect” bullshit! If they were there to serve and protect, they would have found any way but the way they did it to handle this scene…. (See the entire quote on this page.)

Get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America,a visionary and concrete blueprint for this new and radically different state power, a revolutionary socialist society aiming for a communist world.